Spiritual Support

Abstract

Spiritual support is defined as assistance that is provided by one church member to a fellow church member with the explicit purpose of bolstering and maintaining the faith of the recipient. Four issues are examined in this chapter: (1) a detailed theoretical explanation of the ways in which communities of faith promote spiritual support is provided; (2) issues in the measurement of spiritual support are discussed; (3) the scant empirical literature on communities of faith and spiritual support is reviewed; and (4) two submodels are presented that provide further insight into the nature of the relationship between communities of faith and spiritual support.